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Southern Baptists work to gain foothold in Northeast

The Lowell Sun

Updated:
03/23/2013 06:34:40 AM EDT

By Jay Lindsay

Associated Press

FALL RIVER -- Pastor Tom Cabral still tells people to meet him at "the bar," even though it's his church now. Locals best remember his worn building as a former sports bar where a 19-year-old once walked in and shot three suspected rival crack dealers.

Eight years later, the mirrored walls, parquet dance floor and bar remain. But the worst trouble may be found around the Sunday school table, where kids try to heed a handwritten list of rules including: "We will walk indoors, not run."

Redemption Fellowship of Fall River is one of dozens of churches the Southern Baptist Convention has planted around New England in the last decade with a multi-million dollar push into territory skeptical of the South and increasingly indifferent to religion.

Since 2002, the Southern Baptists have spent about $5 million to plant churches around the region, and have another $800,000 committed for this year, said Jim Wideman, executive director of the Baptist Convention of New England, the Southern Baptist's regional church-planting arm.

They've started 133 new churches in that time, a nearly 70 percent increase that brings their regional total to 325.

No denomination is investing as much in New England church planting, though Hartford Seminary professor Scott Thumma notes that attendance isn't growing as fast as the number of churches.

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Thumma said the roughly 30,500 members the denomination had in New England 2010 is a 20 percent increase from a decade ago, according to the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. "I don't see a third Great Awakening happening at the moment," Thumma said.

Southern Baptists, the nation's largest Protestant group with about 16 million members, have been trying since the late 1950s to build a northern presence. But their vigorous, recent church-planting is part of a broader, denomination-wide emphasis at a time when overall membership is declining.

Cabral's church has 35 members, barely enough to cast a decent shadow in the annex of larger Southern Baptist churches. But Cabral says he's not going anywhere. He says he wants to give people a chance to let God change them and see how this church plant goes.

"It's like growing a garden," he said. "You've got to plant the seed, you've got to water it and you've got to be faithful."

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